[vox-tech] RH keeps crashing

[Shawn P. Neugebauer]

On Monday 22 April 2002 10:53 am, you wrote:
> I'm also not at home with the box right now.  I'm trying to log in
> remotely, and unable to do so (though I was able to just an hour ago)...
> there is simply no response from my computer.

As has been discussed, it's good to clarify this.  Based on what you
say elsewhere, I think what you mean is that the graphical interface
is not responding to keyboard or mouse events. 

> I had some problems with Evolution last night, which I had traced to a
> problem with its mail folders.  I had tried killing Evolution and
> restarting it but that seemed to cause the system to crash.  I removed the
> Evolution RPM's and reinstalled them, and things seemed to go all right for
> a few hours, and then it crashed again.
>
> Perhaps "crash" is not the technical term.  The system simply froze
> up.  The screensaver was on in the second case, but immobile (those ants
> were stuck on that moebius strip forever, not moving).  I couldn't figure
> out what else to do either time, so I simply pressed the "reset" button on
> the computer.  The computer rebooted, of course, and prompted me to run
> fsck each time, which I did.

Again, by "froze up" you probably mean that the graphical interface was
unresponsive.  There are other things one needs to do to know for sure
that the kernel has crashed.  Often, X will crash, giving a user at the
console the impression that the machine has "crashed," when in fact
the kernel and most other things are still working fine--that's one of
the benefits of unix.  Secret keystroke:  ctrl-alt-backspace will attempt
to kill the X server.  Often, it will succeed, dumping you back at your
login prompt.  If it does not, it's good to attempt to ping the machine
from another place on the network (assuming you are networked).
If you can ping it, you can often use telnet/ssh to access the machine,
then kill X/restart the machine/stop offending process (netscape?) etc.
A last resort option, still much preferred to pressing the reset button,
is the magic sys request key (a separate topic--anyone?).

I'll emphasize that what others are saying about checking logs, using
dmesg, etc. is very important for understanding the cause.

Hope these few suggestions give you some options next time.

shawn.